Part 9: The Personal Relation of a Christian to Jesus Christ

(VI.9, p. 305). Part 9 probes the concrete life of the Christian believer. The Christian is always in the process of becoming a Christian, Rahner says, a process which takes place not primarily by intellectual reflection but by responding to God's invitation (A). The Christian's relation to Jesus Christ is identical with his or her life-work and destiny, i.e., the way one accepts God's offer of life and lives it freely and responsibly (B). In the way we respond to one another, we express our relation to God's Word and to the Father himself (C). God intends us to love, not in the abstract, but in the concrete. When we love one another, we express what God wants, namely, love of God (D). When we made choices, when we commit ourselves to this or that, we are committing ourselves to a life-direction, committing ourselves to the fate which we hope God will affirm at the moment of our death (E).

A. The Need for an "Existentiell" Christology (VI.9.A, p. 305). “A person is always a Christian in order to become one,” says Rahner. He means that the Christianity we know, even in our baptism as children, and also in the kind of “social Christianity” we experience in family and community, is a Christianity we still need to appropriate as our own throughout our entire lives. This is the meaning of “existentiell.” When we appropriate the faith as our own, we realize it, we make it real, we bring it to actualization, and it becomes “existentiell.”

Section 9.A continues in the printed version of The Foundations of Karl Rahner, now available from the Crossroad Publishing Company.